1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to distributed computing resources, and more particularly to systems and methods for programmatically configuring virtual computing systems and managing distributed computing, network, and storage resources to provide computing services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today, many web-based applications, including Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, are implemented using an architecture consisting of multiple distributed components in order to address scalability and reliability. The individual resources in use may reside on physically or logically separate machines. These resources are typically compute and/or storage resources interconnected through networks. As the number of resources in use grows larger it becomes increasingly difficult to manage the provisioning and monitoring of such resources, as well as the deployment of application level components on them. The problem becomes more difficult with increasing dynamism in the application environment. For example, SaaS environments tend to be more dynamic in the frequency and number of feature rollouts, as well as in terms of the variability of load on the application, than other types of web-based applications.
Solutions that attempt to address parts of this problem include “grid” related technologies or distributed resource managers such as the Globus® Toolkit, the Sun Grid Compute Utility from Sun Microsystems, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from Amazon Web Services, and other application and server provisioning technologies, including the N1 Grid Engine line of products from Sun Microsystems. However, there exists a need for facilities to enable automated management of these kinds of environments on behalf of the emerging market of small and medium sized SaaS providers, thereby limiting the increasing costs associated with their management.